If it takes three instances to make a trend, then Admission, the romantic comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd that opened this weekend, makes it official: Fey may take on a great many subjects in her movies and television work, but her great emerging theme is what happens when professional women in their late thirties are confronted with their own maternal urges. Admission, which flips the script on efforts concerned with fertility like Baby Mama and 30 Rock, could have been a fresh take for Fey, a look at a character who genuinely doesn’t want to have children. But unfortunately, it’s her weakest stab at the subject yet, a movie that’s unwilling to grapple with the reasons other than simply being busy that a woman might have put off childbearing—or why a woman might not want children at all.

In Admission, unlike her previous characters, who have had trouble conceiving, Portia Nathan, Fey’s rigid Princeton admissions officer character, got pregnant in college. Rather than raise the child, Portia gave up the baby for adoption, and buried all thoughts of having a family so deep that they don’t resurface until 16 years later, when they’re forcibly unearthed by a classmate, John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who believes one of the students at the alternative school that he runs is Portia’s son. What follows is Portia’s quest to get the boy, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) into Princeton, hoping that his love of learning and exceptionally high test scores will offset his extremely poor grades and lack of activities.

But while all of her efforts, including getting Jeremiah a chance to stay on campus, setting up an interview with an eccentric professor of philosophy, and trying to juice his ventriloquism hobby into a legitimate side pursuit, are mildly amusing, they also serve to allow Admission to avoid larger, and much more interesting, questions. We learn that Portia’s college boyfriend broke up with her before she found out she was pregnant, but the movie never asks whether she would have kept her child had they stayed together. When, before Portia meets Jeremiah, her long-term boyfriend Mark (Michael Sheen, who played one of Liz Lemon’s most irritating boyfriends on 30 Rock), an English professor, leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar he’s gotten pregnant with twins, Admission focuses more on the fact that the other woman is more glamorous than Portia, rather than interrogating the idea that Portia’s stated lack of interest in children might have made her less desirable to a man who feels the pull of a more conventional family structure, even though he hates kids. And while Portia clearly feels that she didn’t do right by Jeremiah, Admission never makes remotely clear what, other than getting him into Princeton, she wants to do with her adopted son. Does she want to support him financially? Have a friendship with him? Of course the discovery of a specific child raises specific questions, but Admission spends more time poking fun at Portia’s fiercely feminist mother Susannah (Lily Tomlin) than it does at actually exploring what Portia would do differently in raising her own child, or why she might genuinely not have wanted children at all, given her upbringing. And the movie never even really resolves the question of whether Portia doesn’t want to be a parent, or whether the trauma of her unwanted pregnancy caused her to bury her maternal urges, preferring instead to throw in a silly montage in place of character development.
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Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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When 30 Rock premiered on October 11, 2006, I wasn’t a television critic. I barely had the credential that Tracy Jordan would later use to try to sell his Thomas Jefferson biopic, “television watcher.” I was newishly single, living in a newish city, and had recently become the first person in my family to acquire a subscription to cable. As I settled into the rhythms of adult life, one of the things I learned was how to watch television*, whether I was marathoning Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (a useful source of valuable tips for how to avoid being murdered in the big city), scarfing down Sex and the City, which I got on disc from the Blockbuster that once stood on a corner two blocks away, and discovering the wonders of my first broadcast television season.

30 Rock was the first network show I fell in love with, the first thing—in the days before I got a DVR—that I made appointment viewing, that I introduced to my parents. In retrospect, it was perfect training for a television critic. 30 Rock was a clinic in how to balance long-arc character development with a mind-boggling joke density and quality A, B, and C plotting week to week. But it was also a show that taught me how television got made, and that ended up informing my reporting about what happens along the way from a show’s conception to its arrival and survival on the air.

30 Rock didn’t just have a novel-for-television setting: it drew its procedural elements from actual and substantial issues in television. Over the past several years, and aided by the rise of social media and the infiltration of general-interest media sites by trade reporting about everything from ratings data to showrunner hirings and firings, knowing a lot about the business of television has become part of being an engaged television fan. But for me, and I’d imagine for a lot of other people who were watching the show simply as fans rather than as reporters, 30 Rock was an early introduction to a lot of the facts about how the television industry worked. 30 Rock got episodes out of the fact that product integration is both a cost savings for shows, and the result of corporate consolidation that made media companies part of larger conglomerates; that women and people of color in television writers’ rooms are often paid by diversity fellowships that get them their initial jobs, but are structured such that studios have disincentives to promote them to positions where their salaries wouldn’t be covered by fellowships; that Standards and Practices departments can be enormously arbitrary places that question everything from the intensity of the yellow in a urine sample to a couple’s shift in position during sex. The show made clear that these rules and practices were hilariously arbitrary, but also that they were something you had to accept if you wanted to work in the business, and the only way to live with them was to laugh at them, very hard, and to see what space it was possible to create around them.

But for all that 30 Rock could be hilariously pessimistic about the conditions under which television was created, and the extent to which those conditions ground down even the people who had the greatest hopes for what they could do with the form on network, the series has gone out on a subtly hopeful and ambitious note. Sometimes, it suggested, when Jack Donaghy turned NBC over to Kenneth Parcells, people who adore television get to make it for a living. And even if Kenneth represents a kind of cheerful mediocrity—he presented Liz with a long list of “TV no-no words” when she tried to pitch him a new project after TGS ended—30 Rock suggested that progress will continue anyway.
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As the end of 30 Rock approaches on Thursday, I’ve been going through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief as I prepare to lose the network television show that’s dominated my time as a critic: denial, anger, handshakefulness, depression, and marathon watching. I’ve thought a great deal about what I want to say about the end of Tina Fey’s brilliant, persistent creation, the show that beat Aaron Sorkin, that helped define NBC’s comedy brand as the smart kid at the party, and that helped lever Fey from Saturday Night Life to massive stardom. But watching the first several seasons of 30 Rock again, I was struck less by the show’s gender politics, which have always been a key focus of the show and the criticism of it, or by its wicked satire of the broadcast television business, which I’ve gotten to see in action at the Television Critics Association press tour, than the very fine line it walked on race.

30 Rock‘s become more of a cartoon over time, but its initial premise was as much a racial one as it was about gender, and one with resonance both for our political environment and the arguments we’ve had about race on television in the years since 30 Rock debuted. Liz Lemon, a middle-class white woman (from Whitehaven, PA), who’d created a sketch show with her white best friend, had her world turned upside down when she was forced to add Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), who was not just a man, but an African-American man of exceedingly modest and unfamiliarly urban origins, to her program as a co-star. As Liz and Tracy got to know each other, 30 Rock pulled off an extraordinarily difficult feat. In its early years, it was often a show about the ways in which the broad preconceptions of white liberals fail them when they begin some of their first personal and professional relationships with people of color. And in Tracy and Angie Jordan, 30 Rock did something even harder: it gave characters of color the opportunity to take alternately cheerful and exasperated advantage of Liz’s awkwardness, without ever portraying them as race hustlers, and staged constant debates among African-American characters about what constituted racial progress. Liz’s issues might loom large and cause discomfort, but she was mistaking the sideshow of her feelings for the main event.

Almost from the moment we met her, one of Liz Lemon’s signature preoccupations was demonstrating that she was not, in fact, a racist. “Race is a huge issue, according to Newsweek magazine,” Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski), Liz’s best friend told her in an early episode of the show they created together. “Well, it is 2007 and some of us don’t have these hangups,” Liz declared, proud of herself. But of course, Liz is rife with racial hangups, many of which she mistook for sensitivity. In the season one episode “Jack-tor,” for example, Liz became convinced that Tracy was illiterate after he flubbed a series of cue cards. When she offered to give him time off to attend reading classes, Tracy amused himself by taking advantage of her condescension. “I can’t read!” he declared histrionically as he high-tailed it out of the office. “I sign my name with an X! I once tried to make mashed potatoes with laundry detergent! I think I voted for Nader!” When she discovered that he was tweaking her, rather than examining her own preconceptions, Liz got huffy about Tracy’s reaction to her assumptions. “He took advantage of my white guilt, which is only to be used for good, like overtipping, and supporting Barack Obama,” she explained, casting herself a a victim, and long before Obama even formally began his campaign for president, setting up support for him as a proxy for racial self-congratulation by white voters.

Liz made similar mistakes early in her relationship with Tracy’s wife, Angie (Sherri Shepherd), falling back on racial tropes in the absence of knowing how to make conversation with Angie like an actual person. “Bling-bling! Ghetto fabulous!” Liz complimented her on a diamond ring Tracy brought her as part of a reconciliation. “This belonged to Brooke Astor,” Angie told her, irritated. And their relationship got worse when Angie demanded approval over Tracy’s characters on the show, rejecting a pimp character named Slickback Lamar, and refusing to be mollified by an Obama sketch. “No,” she told Liz. “We support Kucinich.” And while Angie initially wanted to sanitize TGS of racial stereotypes, she would ultimately turn a profit, and create a hit for NBC in Queen of Jordan, a broad reality show in the tradition of the Real Housewives that featured Angie and her entourage, while making a joke out of executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), whose anxiety about preserving his dignity set him up for constant humiliation. Liz may have told old-school comedy writer Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher) that “You can’t do race stuff on TV. It’s too sensitive,” and been taken aback when Rosemary told her of a blackface sketch pitch that “We would have done that on the Mandrell Sisters.” And as it turns out, it’s not Liz who figures out how to do racial comedy on television, but Angie, who finds a business model in exploiting racial and sexual stereotypes and preconceptions—many of them likely held by people who think of themselves as liberals.
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30 Rock is coming to an end, and sometimes, it’s seemed like that might be the end of Alec Baldwin on television. But the actor just signed a two-year contract with Universal, the studio that produced 30 Rock. And hopefully we’ll get some new projects out of it. While I’ll always miss Jack Donaghy, here are five kinds of roles I’d love to see Baldwin in once he’s no longer committed to wearing tuxedoes after six o’clock.

1. A show about the Mayor of New York: When he’s talking about his career after acting, Baldwin has frequently speculated about running for political office, including for Mayor of New York. Now that Starz has cancelled its drama Boss, which starred Kelsey Grammer as Mayor of Chicago, there’s space for a prestige drama with a middle-aged prestige actor chewing political scenery. Baldwin loves a juicy line reading, and he’s got the elegance to carry it off. Post-Sandy, post-Occupy, and post-crash, it’s time for a show about New York that isn’t confined to Brooklyn a Girls or 2 Broke Girls, and that isn’t confined to young people in New York, either.

2. A romantic comedy about a middle-aged man: Baldwin’s heartbroken, nostalgic visitor to the Italy of his youth was the best part of To Rome With Love. His relationships with powerful women were some of the most entertaining parts of 30 Rock. And from profiles of him, it seems like he’s a romantic in real life. There aren’t enough good romantic comedies for actual adults. And I have mixed feelings about Nancy Meyers and It’s Complicated, in which Baldwin also starred as hound dog rather than as a romantic. But it would be nice to see Baldwin get to indulge those impulses, to be a man who’s sincere about love rather than blowing it off, and experiencing some of the yearnings and insecurities that normally are reserved for women.

3. A mid-life crisis show: Mid-life crises are big for women on television: Laura Dern’s melting down on HBO’s Enlightened. Annette Bening will be doing the same thing on NBC in Save Me. The Newsroom was supposed to, in part, be about a middle-aged man trying to be a better person, but it wasn’t willing to be nearly hard enough on Will McAvoy to be interesting. Watching someone like Baldwin actually go through radically reevaluating his life would be fascinating to watch.

4. A reporting show: Speaking of The Newsroom, television really needs a show that actually understands how reporting works. Thinking of how much fun Bill Nighy has chomping scenery in things like State of Play and Page Eight, I realized that Baldwin may be the closest thing he has to a potential American equivalent. He’d be a delightful editor character in a multi-generational newsroom drama.

Of all the new shows I’ve been monitoring this fall, the one that confounds me the most thus far is The Mindy Project. I had what were almost certainly unfairly high expectations for the program, about a young ob/gyn based in part on Mindy Kaling’s mother, given Kaling’s work on The Office, her status as a fully-developed cross-platform comedic voice, and my enthusiasm for the subject material, including women’s health and medical billing. But I can’t decide if I like the show, in part because I can’t decide if I like its main character.

Low-level female difficulty on television tends to be most interesting if it’s to an end. Liz Lemon’s crazy is the result of a poor work-life balance and in response to the insane expectations of women in Hollywood. Hannah Horvath’s wild vacillations are the result of a girl being told she’s talented but never being expected or forced to turn that talent in any applied direction. So far, Mindy’s damage, seems more like a symptom of bratty entitlement than part of a larger constellation. I appreciated that her character carried out a competent delivery in the first episode, but not so much that it erased my real sense of anger at her for missing another patient’s delivery because she was being a mess and then acting irritated when another doctor got credit for and business out of doing her job. Similarly, the idea that she’d hire a nurse because of a shared affinity for romantic comedies turned me off. Mindy seems more like a child than the grown person with character and nuance the show seems to want me to believe she is, more the supporting character with her love of romantic comedies as a single, defined quirk that provides fuel for recurring jokes, rather than the multi-faceted main character The Mindy Project needs her to be. Some of these elements feel like natural transitions from Kaling’s stint writing and playing Kelly Kapoor on The Office, and perhaps an illustration of some difficulties Kaling is have extricating herself from a character who is drawn closely from her own experiences and viewing Mindy independently as the woman who is ushering her character into the world and into prime time.

But it remains a problem for the show that Mindy is someone who, if I met her in real life, I don’t think I’d want to spend much time with. The bar is lower for people I don’t have to meet in the real world and admits much stranger fictional creations than I’d accept real ones. But they aren’t completely divorced from each other. A character who falls in the dangerous zone of irritating, rather than being either genuinely compelling or a fascinating, illustrative train wreck is a difficult one to attach to.

The Mindy Project also feels to me, so far, like an illustration of why, while it’s really important to have shows that star women of color and women whose bodies don’t fit an exceedingly narrow Hollywood ideal, the presence of both of those conditions is not actually sufficient to make a show good or interesting. It’s nice to see that Kaling didn’t shrink in between her transition from a supporting player to a star. But it’s exhausting to see Danny (Chris Messina), the doctor who is her obvious love interest, tell her, with what seemed like apparent intent to hurt her, that she could stand to lose fifteen pounds. And I thought last week’s episode, in which Kaling repeatedly re-orders frozen yogurt while on a date with Seth Meyers, ended up making her look like a child (something that was also the case during her first-episode date with Ed Helms) rather than saying something sensual and interesting about her appetites or her relationship with food. Maybe Danny will come around about Mindy’s body, maybe the show’s thoughts about Mindy and food, which has popped up as a theme twice, will cohere. But right now, the show is in an odd interim place where more mean about Mindy’s weight than it is either treating her like a normal sitcom star no matter what she looks like or actually examining Mindy’s relationship to her body. I’m not sure it’s progress to put someone of Kaling’s size (which honestly, seems fairly close to mine, and thus not even truly that daring) on television if the joke and character beats feel old and slightly cruel.

Thus far, the show’s perspective on race feels like it’s coming from a bunch of different directions, and I’m more interested in the ways in which they’ll cohere into a complete picture. The scene in the first episode where Mindy, drunk and riding a stolen child’s bike down a dark suburban street, hollers “Racist!” at a driver who honks at her, is a very smart, subtle one-word joke both about the possibilities both that people’s actions are influenced by racism and that charges of racism can be not just spurious but frivolous. The show hasn’t commented directly on what it means for a South Asian woman to covet romantic comedy dreams, though Mindy’s boyfriend, who she meets cute in ideal romantic comedy circumstances, does leave her for a younger, Eastern European woman—the dream is only available to everywomen who meet certain racial and age criteria. Then, there’s her attitudes towards lower-income patients, which is inflected by both class and race. Mindy may act like she has a candy heart with a little boy who translates for his veiled, uinsured mother, telling him to lie to her about their family’s insurance status so she can accept her as a patient, but she complains bitterly about poor patients to her coworkers. That constellation of factors is sharper and more interesting than anything The Mindy Project‘s done with body image or Mindy’s relationship with food, and I think the show might be sharper if her relationship with romantic comedies was filtered through a lens of race and class rather than foregrounded. I understand that romantic comedies are the show’s hook. But I can’t help but wonder if the show would be more interesting if Kaling’s specific perspective on them was a bit more foregrounded so the show would feel like a conversation with a close, smart friend rather than a recapitulation of archetypal story beats.

And really, I suppose, that’s what I’m finding difficult about The Mindy Project, which should be everything I like on television. I need Mindy to give me a reason to keep her around. Because unlike her best friend Gwen, we’re not bound by chains of friendship stretching back to colleges that require me to do hangover maintenance on her and debrief over lunch. We’re still getting to know each other. And so far, though Fox has given the show a full season, I’m not sure whether I want to stay for another drink or another episode.

For more on The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect, and other pop culture ephemera, check out the latest episode of A Movie and An Argument With Alyssa and Swin:

Awards are always a terribly flawed way of determining what makes for good popular culture. Limits on the number of nominees lock deserving contenders out of their categories. Differences between the people who watch television shows or movies and the people in the pool assigned to judge them can produce some truly baffling biases and decisions. And winning doesn’t automatically transform a show’s prospects of staying on the air or an actor’s chance of getting good work in the future. But all of those caveats aside, it can be hugely satisfying to see a small show get the recognition you assume it’ll be denied, or an actor break barriers. And if you want better television, here are the shows and performances you should root for get whatever boost it’s possible to wring out of the Emmys on Sunday.

COMEDY SERIES
Who’s Nominated:
The Big Bang Theory
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Girls
Modern Family
30 Rock
Veep

Who Should Win: Girls

Why: There are a lot of legacy shows on this list, and some very notable omissions, particularly Parks and Recreation, which had a much stronger season than its network counterpart 30 Rock. Given that, I have to root for Girls, one of the few comedies to arrive on television knowing exactly what it was and what its strengths were, even if during its run, creator Lena Dunham had to confront some of its more notable weaknesses and absences, particularly when it came to race. Flawed though it may be, those of us rooting for more personal, low-budget shows—and who would like to see folks of color get the opportunities Dunham and Louis C.K. have—should hope for Girls to take home the statuette over more commercial favorites like The Big Bang Theory.

COMEDY ACTOR
Who’s Nominated:
Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory
Larry David as Himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan in House of Lies
Louis C.K. as Louie in Louie
Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
Jon Cryer as Alan Harper in Two and a Half Men

Who Should Win: Louis C.K. or Don Cheadle

Why: It’s impossible to compare C.K.’s exploration of wounded and uncertain middle-aged masculinity and Cheadle’s turn as a hyped-up management consultant struggling to raise his potentially transgender son with tenderness and consideration. House of Lies is an inconsistent mess in comparison to the jewel-like Louie. But C.K. isn’t exactly lacking in recognition. And Cheadle’s playing a character who’s more distant from his real self than C.K. Plus, a black actor hasn’t won the Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Emmy since Robert Guillaume for Benson in 1985.

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It’s the beginning of the end of an era at NBC. We’ve known for months now that this season of 30 Rock will be that venerable sitcom’s last. Yesterday, showrunner Greg Daniels announced that The Office will wrap up this season as well. Community‘s changed showrunner hands as well, after the firing of Dan Harmon, and it’s hard to know if that shift will produce a show that will earn a fifth season. Parks and Recreation may be the last show on the network’s Thursday night comedy with a serious chance of continuing beyond the spring of 2013.

But while it will be difficult to say goodbye to all of these sitcoms, which have significantly defined my adult television watching, with departure comes opportunity. There’s an enormous amount of talent tied up in these comparatively low-rated shows, and I’m excited to see what everyone involved with them is going to do next. Some of them, like The Office’s Steve Carrell and Mindy Kaling have already departed for movie careers or new projects. Here are seven ideas for what other people who have given us so much fun on Thursday nights could do once their shows end.

1. Mike Schur should make a show about a television news station: The Parks and Recreation creator, who just signed a new deal with Universal Television, ran the Weekend Update segment during his stint on Saturday Night Live. On Parks and Rec, local talk show host Joan Callamezzo and anchor Perd Hapley are among the funniest supporting characters anywhere on television. TV needs a fantastic, cutting satire of news that isn’t created by Aaron Sorkin. Schur’s the guy to give it to us.

2. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey should play best friends who are mothers to young children: Poehler already gave cinematic birth to Fay’s daughter in Baby Mama. They’re hilarious whenever they’re in the same frame together. And given that television is obsessed with the novel idea of men raising their own young right now, in shows from ABC Family’s Baby Daddy to NBC’s upcoming shows The New Normal and Guys With Kids. Maybe now that we’ve gotten used to the idea that men have to give up things to raise children and that those adjustments take time, American audiences are ready to be sympathetic to mothers, who have always been in that position.

3. Put Aisha Muharrar, Megan Ganz, Katie Dippold, Kay Cannon, and Annie Mebane in a room and produce whatever they come up with: I’m not sure NBC gets enough credit for this, but its Thursday night comedies employ a mind-blowing number of smart young female writers. I would watch anything any of these women, or any combination of these women, put together in a heartbeat.

4. Keith Powell and Alison Brie should have an arc on a show where they date: If I have one complaint about 30 Rock over the years, it’s been the waste of the show’s incredibly strong supporting cast. As Toofer, Powell’s been very funny as the fussy, high class Harvard graduate who’s sometimes driven nuts by his fellow writers. I’d love to see him play off Brie, who’s been perfect as the precise Annie Edison over three years on Community, and deserves a chance to play the kind of sexy adult she plays on AMC and in movies on a broadcast show. Maybe in a program where Alec Baldwin plays Brie’s boss. If I can’t get that, I’ll take a spinoff web series about Grizz and Dot Comm in compensation.

5. Develop a show around Retta as a stand-up comedian: Her performance as Donna has been incredible on Parks and Rec, and while cable networks are falling all over themselves to give show deals to white male comedians, Retta seems like she could crush it on network. Showbiz shows haven’t worked particularly well on NBC of late—Up All Night is cutting its talk show to focus more on the characters at home. But whether Retta did something about doing stand-up, or based in her routines, I’d love to see her sidle in from the corner of the frame to claim center stage.

6. Craig Robinson. Judah Friedlander. Road trip: Two big guys, one good at projecting surprising empathy and precision, the other with a particular talent for reveling in mess, perversion, relationships with Susan Sarandon, and dressing up in women’s clothes and teaching self-defense lessons. I may not have been lured by The Hangover or other buddies-behaving-badly movies, but these guys would get me in the seats.

7. Adam Scott, Danny Pudi, Ellie Kemper as neighbors, and possibly roommates: Ben deserves a break from April and Andy. Have Scott, Kemper, and Pudi occupy the three apartments around the end of the hall. Put Kemper in the middle one and you’ve got the physical and actorly set up for a very nerdy, adorably enthusiastic love triangle.

Over the past several days, I’ve been reading my colleagues reactions to NBC’s executive session at the Television Critics Association press tour, particularly to president Bob Greenblatt’s remarks that, while he loved comedies like Community and Parks and Recreation (a claim that in Community‘s case, I doubt the veracity of), he doesn’t plan to make more of them. “What Greenblatt seems to mean in his formulation is that ‘broadening’ is actually a process of programming shows that are less personal visions of the world by their creators, and more big, easily grasped concepts packaged as big-laff heart-warmers,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker. Time’s James Poniewozik wrote “NBC is under no obligation to make challenging, narrow sitcoms that only critics like me love. TV is a business, and that, as history proves, frequently means being a monkey business. Also: you can make big, broad, even dumb comedies that are great!” And Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter weighed in with a close read of Greenblatt’s carefully couched remarks to suggest that “the words used definitely implied what people seemed to fear – that NBC was going to dumb things down in a real hurry. But the unsexy qualifiers that were left out also suggested that Greenblatt was thinking of something more complex – and that is a middle ground where comedy can be broadly appealing while also smart as opposed to a sophisticated lock-box of cleverness that appeals to a niche audience and thus keeps NBC in the basement.”

I agree with all of those assessments, to a certain extent. But I think that the challenges NBC has faced with finding audiences for its current crop of comedies is fairly easy to diagnose, and with an answer that doesn’t come down to merely that they were too smart for a dumb audience. And that diagnosis suggests the beginnings of a formula that NBC can use to fix itself.

NBC’s critically acclaimed comedies are complex both in their concept and in their human details. 30 Rock is not just about the backstage antics at a television show, it’s about the backstage antics of a sketch comedy show, and how those antics are influenced by corporate pressure. Its characters are engaging precisely because they’re not archetypes: instead, the show stars a neurotic, middle-aged single woman, an insecure black star who intellectualizes his stardom, and a depressive corporate executive. Parks and Recreation is about a small town, but a high-concept one with apocalypse cults and Indian massacre sites and wacky Peruvian sister city delegations. Again, the characters themselves are wonderful and rich, whether it’s libertarian Ron Swanson or apathetic April, and they’re highly unusual tropes in an already wacky town. Community, when you think about it, started off as the lowest-concept of these shows, about students at a community college, and initially, only two of its main characters, movie-obsessed Abed and millionaire Pierce were major deviations from existing tropes. And as much as Community‘s been praised for its experimental episodes, which are genius, it’s also been exceptionally good at its entirely conventional storylines, like Troy’s first legal drink.

I think some of NBC’s response to its current woes, and the response that’s been getting much of the attention, has been to think that both its concepts and its specific storylines and haracter need to be as generic as possible. It’s why they’re producing a show like Guys With Kids, which has an increasingly familiar premise—men staying home to raise children—and relies for humor on the exceedingly low-level, generic idea that males of the species caring for their young is inherently hilarious. To its credit, I don’t think NBC’s reaching all the way for the lowest common denominator. Nothing on its schedule has jokes as racist and pandering as 2 Broke Girls, for example, and the network’s new shows are actually strikingly diverse.

But it’s also instructive to watch 1600 Penn, which the network will begin airing in the midseason, and like Guys With Kids, is one of the worst shows of a new pilot crop. That show, like 30 Rock and Community, has a very specific premise: it’s a look inside the dynamics of the first family, something only a handful of living people can actually relate to without reaching for metaphor. The characters within that family are also specific, some in a way that are relatable and universal—a perfectionist daughter, a hypercompetitive dad—and some of whom are less so—a trophy wife second First Lady, a heavy, fratty First Son who is both cause and solution of international crises. The father and daughter work, but the wife and son are weighed down in nasty cliches and implausibility that isn’t actually funny or insightful. Specificity can be as lowest-common denominator as broadness, and NBC has examples of both ways to fail on its fall schedule.
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Since Dan Harmon’s dismissal as the showrunner of Community, the endearingly experimental sitcom he created for NBC, there’s been a vibrant discussion about that particular role in the television ecosystem. Are showrunners primarily creative visionaries? Replaceable management functionaries? Is the job a fundamentally ungainly hybrid? Have critics and fans focused too closely on showrunners at the expense of credit for other people behind the camera and in front of it? One thing that crossed my mind though, is that while the rise of the celebrity showrunner is due in part to the emergence of figures like David Chase, David Milch, David Simon and Matthew Weiner on cable, credit also goes to a show that both put a showrunner at its center, and warned us that they could be mercurial, unlikable, ineffective sellouts—and heroes none the less: 30 Rock.

When Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock premiered in the fall of 2006, the assumption is that Sorkin’s drama would crush Fey’s plucky sitcom. Sorkin’s vision of troubled geniuses with noble ambitions is in line with fans’ perception of Dan Harmon, or of Chase, or Milch, or Simon, or Weiner—and of course, with Sorkin’s sense of himself. They may be cranky, they may have serious problems relating to other people and managing themselves, but they are fundamentally heroes. Even though those basic ideas took hold, Sorkin’s show didn’t: Studio 60 died after a single season, while 30 Rock is headed grandly into its seventh and final year. Over time, debates about the show have come to center around Liz Lemon as feminist totem, exploring her sexuality, her work-life balance, her role as a forebear of the Lady Loser Comedy trend, and both the conversation and the show have moved away from the show’s initial subject: the ridiculousness and impossibility of having a single person try to wrangle a writers’ room, actors, and network executives.

In its pilot, 30 Rock acknowledged that there was something quixotic both about trying to get the public to care about people who make television, and once they were over that hurdle, expecting them to find genius or high-mindedness behind the scenes. We first hear Liz Lemon’s name when Kenneth Purcell, an NBC page, tries to convince a group touring 30 Rockefeller Plaza that he’s got a genuine treat in store for them. “Here’s someone you never get a chance to meet,” he tells them. “The head writer of The Girlie Show, Liz Lemon.” He applauds in a void—the only response from the tour group is a belch from a young boy. Liz later complains that Kenneth has embarrassed her by singling her out, and when she meets Tracy Jordan for lunch, she’s surprised when he recognizes her. Kenneth’s enthusiasm, his sense that she is someone special, is meant to be a joke.
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